The Transcultural Transferability of Bourdieu's Sociology of Education Author(s): Derek Robbins Reviewed work(s): Source: British Journal of Sociology

of Education, Vol. 25, No. 4, Special Issue: Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Education: The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory (Sep., 2004), pp. 415-430 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4128668 . Accessed: 21/11/2011 15:23
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British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 25, No. 4, September 2004

Carfax Publishing &Francis

Taylor Group

The transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology of education

Derek Robbins*
University of East London, UK

As early as 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of the particular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The same argument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted that Bourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction (Bourdieu, 1979, 1986), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis for social differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular and universal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on the question of the transferability of his concepts, such as 'cultural capital'. The English Preface to Homo Academicus(Bourdieu, 1988) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the text of French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while Practical Reason (Bourdieu, 1994, 1998) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered the applicability of La Distinctionto Japanese society. The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu's sociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during his lifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British context during the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdom in Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971) to the reception of his more polemical political interventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking. The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work to the British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis of the British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblessed'etat/State du weightof the world(Bourdieu et al., 1993, nobility(Bourdieu, 1989, 1996) and La mise're mondel/The 1999) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from the implications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see the importance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les heritiers/TheInheritors (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970, (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b; 1977) and La reproduction/Reproduction 1977). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether the comparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of his analyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death.

*Professor of International Social Theory, School of Social Sciences, University of East London, UK. Email: D.M.Robbins@uel.ac.uk ISSN 0142-5692(print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/04/040415-16 ? 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0142569042000236925

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Introduction
The paper begins with the author's retrospective account of his 1986 analysis of the reception of Bourdieu's work in the United Kingdom up to 1977. This account had emphasized the ways in which a few of Bourdieu's early articles had been used in the debates of the 1970s around the 'new directions for the sociology of education'. There was, however, a more sophisticated appropriation whereby Margaret Archer diminished Bourdieu's work by suggesting that it was specifically the product of the French educational system and social structure. As such, Bourdieu's work had to be subsumed under a more generalized study of comparative structures. This view neglected Bourdieu's contemporary articulation of a poststructuralist position. For Bourdieu, what had to become paradigmatic was not his 1960s objectivist, sociological accounts of social, educational and cultural reproduction within French society, but the cross-culturally transferable capacity of social agents in different cultures to analyse the particular ways in which they inter-act with their different structures. Methodological reflexivity was at the core of Bourdieu's continuing engagement with French educational and social issues. Although much of his work after 1980 was not labelled as 'sociology of education', there was a persistent engagement with educational matters. The paper then examines the reception of Bourdieu's work in the British Journal of the Sociology of Education in the period from 1980 to 2000. This is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the reception of Bourdieu's work in the United Kingdom in the period, but it is a case study that seeks to suggest that the response of professional sociologists of education continued to concentrate on the work of the 1960s and failed to take up the challenge implicit in Bourdieu's reflexive engagement-a challenge made explicit in the Preface to the English edition of the largely ignored Homo Academicus. The purpose of the paper is to revive that challenge and to stimulate a transcultural implementation of his reflexive method.

Background
In 1986 I wrote a paper entitled 'Bourdieu in England, 1964-1977', which was subsequently published in Higher Education Policy (Robbins, 1989; reprinted Robbins, 2000). I discussed the reception of Bourdieu's work in England by reference to the contexts in which some of his texts had been published in translation during the period, examining the ways in which his intellectual production had been 're-framed' for English consumption. The paper did not engage directly with the content of Bourdieu's theoretical position nor with the very limited number of critical articles that had appeared. It showed some early affinity with Bourdieu's approach in seeking to offer the crude elements of a sociological analysis of the phenomena of textual reception. It gave an account of two phases of appropriation of in the sense that Bourdieu's work by the sociology of education-appropriation the educational reception ignored Bourdieu's defining social anthropological

Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 417 fieldwork in Algeria and confined 'him' to one autonomous intellectual sphere. By the first phase was meant the period in the immediate aftermath of the Durham meeting of the British Sociological Association of April 1970, which led to the publication of ideologically competing texts-Knowledge and Control. New Directions for the Sociology of Education (Young, 1971) and Readings in the Theory of Educational Systems (Hopper, 1971), as well as the more official proceedings of the conference published as Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change. Papers in the Sociology of Education (Brown, 1973). By the second phase was meant the period from 1974 until 1977, when a few of Bourdieu's articles were included in readers of the sociology of education such as Contemporary Research in the Sociology of Education (Eggleston, 1974), Schooling and Capitalism. A Sociological Reader (Dale et al., 1976) and Identity and Structure: Issues in the Sociology of Education (Gleeson, 1977). The accounts of these phases implied a sociological analysis that was never fully articulated. The article suggests that there was a tension between the sociologies of education that were developing at the London School of Economics and at the Institute of Education, London, and that the explanation for the tension might lie in the distinction between the academic, sociological orientation of the one institution and the vocational, pedagogic orientation of the other. It also suggests that this tension in the first phase persisted through the second, now more apparent as a contrast between the politically activist approach to teacher training of the teaching team at the Open University and the more academic institutionalization of the sociology of education spreading from an established base at the University of Leicester to the University of Keele and beyond. The paper broke off at 1977. Again, it only offered hints as to why this end point had been adopted and what might be the shape of the reception of Bourdieu's work in the period from 1977 until the date of writing in 1986. It argued that: ... in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the practice of English education has been thanby anytheory,whilst controlledby politicalandeconomicforcesandagenciesrather whichrevivedafterthe passingof the sociologyof educationhas the educationalthinking
been forced to stand impotently by. (Robbins, 2000, p. 362)

This was code for suggesting that, by the end of the 1970s, the influence on policy of the sociology of education had become marginal as Mrs Thatcher had begun to introduce measures and mechanisms that assumed inter-institutional economic competition was the necessary motor for educational reform. The paper also pointed out that 1977 was a turning-point in the reception of Bourdieu's work. It was the year of the publication in English both of Outline of a theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977), which had originally been published as Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique, precede de trois etudes d'ethnologie kabyle (Bourdieu, 1972), and of the English translation of La reproduction.Elements pour une theorie du systeme d'enseignement, which Bourdieu had written in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron (1970). Rather optimistically, the paper concluded by hoping that these two translations would ensure that Bourdieu's work would then be seen much more in the round and that his contributions to

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research and theory in anthropology and education would not continue to be divorced:
Taken together, these two books for the first time enabled the English reader to associate cultural enquiries. (Robbins, 2000, p. 362)

and educationalwork and to relate both strandsto wider Bourdieu'santhropological

Very few such 'English readers' existed and the paper failed to signal that the dominant development of the period from 1977 to 1986 was that there was a new appropriation bid from the emerging field of Cultural Studies associated with the remains of the 'New Left' movement associated mainly with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. I have recently written about this period of Anglo-French intellectual exchange in a contribution to a collection of essays on Cultural theory (Edwards, forthcoming), but it is worth pointing out here that it was Richard Nice who was responsible for facilitating the shift in the reception of Bourdieu's work from the field of the sociology of education to that of the field of culture or cultural studies. Nice translated Esquisse and La reproductionand, still in 1977, when he was working at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, he also translated two short articles. It is significant that the French subtitle of La reproduction, which offered, literally, the 'elements for a theory of the educational system', became, in translation Reproduction in education, society and culture. Stuart Hall (1978) discussed Bourdieu's work in his On ideology, while the new journal Media, culture and society carried the first translated extracts from La Distinction in its second volume (Garnham & Williams, 1980) with an introductory article on Bourdieu written by Nick Garnham and Raymond Williams entitled 'Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture'. The real reason why the paper ended at 1977 was that I ran out of time. I had been in receipt of a small grant from the ESRC to become familiar with the work of the Centre de Sociologie Europenne, Paris, based at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris. Bourdieu was by then well installed in his office at the Coll ge de France and was less closely involved with the everyday research of the Centre, and I was advised that the best way to secure a meeting with him would be for me to write a paper that could be the basis of a discussion. I reached 1977 in my reading and research in time to forward the paper to him in advance of our first meeting in October 1986. We discussed the specific content of the paper, but he was anxious to think through procedures for understanding the transcultural transmission of texts, proposing that I should undertake a series of case studies that would analyse the differences in the transnational reception of the work of Habermas, Foucault and others. He had, of course, published Homo academicus (Bourdieu, 1984) and, in retrospect, it is possible for me to surmise that he was developing the ideas that he was to offer in the preface to the English translation of that book in 1988. Homo Academicus was not to be read in other cultures as a representation of the competing staff interests and institutional ideologies in Parisian institutions of higher education, but, instead, as a model for the kind of analysis that should be undertaken reflexively of their own intellectual and institutional positions by sociologists operating from the

Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 419 inside. It cannot be denied, of course, that Bourdieu wanted to offer his mode of analysis as of potentially universal validity. His analysis of the field of production of that analysis sought to pre-empt alternative analyses both of the field of production of his thought and of the different international fields of reception. He offered the account of Parisian higher education as a particular example of the general and invited readers to perceive their particular situations in terms of the same generality. The purpose of this paper is briefly to scrutinize the transnational transferability of Bourdieu's sociology of education from the period covered in my article of 1986 through to the present. I shall take the representation of Bourdieu in the British Journal of the Sociology of Education (BJSE) as my main case study, although the full sociological study of the production and dissemination of the sociology of education in the period that this article invites would necessarily involve an analysis of different discipline markets and different levels of primary concern, by contrast, for instance, with Higher Education Studies. A full study would prolong the kind of analysis offered by R. Szreter in two articles published in early issues of the journal: 'Institutionalising a New Specialism: Early Years of the Journal of Educational Sociology' (Szreter, 1980) and 'Writings and Writers on Education in British Sociology Periodicals, 19531979' (Szreter, 1983)

Margaret

Archer's

structuralist

appropriation

of Bourdieu's

early work

Consideration of the work of Margaret Archer provides a link between the reception of Bourdieu in the UK in the 1970s and the establishment of the BJSE in 1980 (of which she was a member of the Editorial Board). In the late 1960s, Margaret Archer had, like Michael Young, become irritated by the extent to which functionalist assumptions were dominating the agenda for sociological research in the educational field. Unlike Young, however, Archer eschewed the attractions of phenomenology and sought, instead, a perspective derived from the comparative analysis of social structures. Her article of 1970 entitled 'Egalitarianism in English and French Educational Sociology' was an important statement of her position. Political commitment to egalitarianism had led to research that had been: of ... almostexclusively concernedwith the distribution education,ignoringissuesabout its contentandprocedures, whichmaybe affectedby distribution, arenot justifiedby but
it. (Archer, 1970)

Archer quoted from Ioan Davies's 'The Management of Knowledge: A Critique of the Use of Typologies in Educational Sociology' (which had appeared in Sociology in 1970 before inclusion in M. F. D. Young's [1971] Knowledge and Control) to support her own view that sociological research had become over-concerned with the input to education. Archer's article pre-dated the debate of the early 1970s and it is clear that she would have been unhappy with the politicization of the sociology of education that was apparent in that debate. Equally, she clearly wrote from close acquaintance with Bourdieu's untranslated accounts of his educational researches. With R. K. Kendall's Report on an inquiry into applicationsfor admission to universities (1957) in England, she

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also singled out, for France, Bourdieu and Passeron's (1964a) Les e'tudiants et leurs etudes to suggest that in both countries the analysis of higher education had, hitherto, concentrated 'upon differential chances of entry according to social class'. Similarly, she quoted from Les he'ritiers(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b) to substantiate her general contention that ... therehas been a tendencyto equate equalityin educationwith the absenceof social
class influence on educational opportunity and to take proportional representation of the different social classes at each level of schooling as its yardstick. (Archer, 1970)

Finally, the article concluded with a close analysis of the different theoretical responses of Touraine and Bourdieu/Passeron to the student unrest of May 1968. The purpose of the comparison, however, was not to express a preference for one position or the other, but rather to show that both demonstrated the inadequacy of methodologies that paid insufficient attention to macrosociological understanding and to show that both, in this respect, shared a common characteristic of a distinctively French orientation:
These two studies have only been dwelt upon to illustrate the ways in which weakness in the macrosociological understanding of education leads to overemphasis of either internal or external determination of University goals and how over-preoccupation with social stratification leads to an exaggerated view of students as either future elites or subelites. In other words, they are studies which find their place in a distinctive sociological tradition and share with it the overriding preoccupation with egalitarianism. (Archer, 1970)

With Michalina Vaughan, Archer published a historical study of educational change that sought to be comparative and macrosociological-Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France, 1789-1848 (Vaughan & Archer, 1971)-and in 1972 she edited Students, University and Society (Archer, 1972). The exposition of methodology of the earlier book appeared as 'Domination and assertion in educational systems' as the third contribution to Earl Hopper's (1971) Readings in the Theory of Educational Systems, but, otherwise, it appears that Archer was not directly involved in the 'new directions' debate nor in the ideological appropriation of Bourdieu's researches. She seems to have made space at the University of Reading and it was there that, beyond the struggle of competing readings in the sociology of education, she tried to develop macrosociological studies that would situate educational research within a comparative framework. Under the auspices of the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies, Giner and Archer organized a series of seminars that brought together colleagues who dealt with various aspects of European society on a country-by-country basis. The outcome of this first series of seminars was Contemporary Europe: Class, Status and Power, which was published in 1971 (Archer & Giner, 1971). This was followed by a further one-day seminar as a result of which it was suggested that the contributions and discussions should:
... eventually be published as a new symposium which would look at European societies across state frontiers, isolating emerging structures, international cultural patterns, and shared institutions, cleavages and conflicts. (Giner & Archer, 1978, pp. vii-viii)

Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 421 The final outcome was Contemporary Europe. Social Structures and Cultural Patterns (Giner & Archer, 1978) for which Margaret Archer herself contributed the first, methodological chapter entitled 'The Theoretical and the Comparative Analysis of the 'new sociSocial Structure'. Here she suggested that recent tendencies-in 'methodological individualism' had served to generate a converology'-towards gence, through common opposition, between Marxist and functionalist views of structure that were, in any case, theoretically compatible: ... developments of the phenomenologicaltradition with their rejection of objective structuraland culturalpropertiesand (concomitant)neglect of macroscopicproblems For have prompteda closing of ranksamong macro-sociologists. the position taken by both ethnomethodologists the tougherversionsof symbolicinteractionism and constitute and methodologywhich are central to the an attack on the problems, subject-matter
latter. (Archer & Giner, 1978, p. 2)

The published collection of Contemporary Europe included an article that had been published in French in 1973 by Bourdieu, Boltanski and Saint-Martin entitled 'Les strategies de reconversion. Les classes sociales et le systeme d'enseignement' (Bourdieu et al., 1973). The translation of the text-rendered as 'Changes in Social Structure and Changes in the Demand for Education'-also included a translation of the first footnote in which the authors had sought to locate their new article alongside their other recent researches. The footnote ran:
The analyses presented here are based on a body of empirical research, the findings of

which (particularly statisticalfindings)have been publishedin detail elsewhere.See the culturelleet reproduction sur sociale',Informations especiallyP. Bourdieu,'Reproduction
les sciences sociales, Vol X, no. 2, 1971, pp. 45-79; P. Bourdieu, L. Boltanski, P. Maldidier, 'La Defense du corps', Informationssur les sciencessociales,vol X, no. 4, 1971; L. Boltanski, 'L'Espace positionnel. Multiplicite des positions institutionnelles et habitus de classe,' Revue franCaisede sociologie,Vol XIV, 1973, pp. 3-26 ... (Archer & Giner, 1978, p. 221)

The authors had wanted to demonstrate the continuity and coherence of their recent research, but the effect of the reproduction of the footnote in the English translation was to emphasize the Frenchness of the analyses and findings. The orientation of the collection is indicated by the way in which Archer introduced the work of Bourdieu and Boltanski in her initial summary of the collected texts. She offered a comparison between the Bourdieu/Boltanski text and an earlier contribution and commented: in WhilstCauser' discussesdegreesof interdependence a relationship whichsome have as interpreted one of completedependence,Bourdieuand Boltanskiareconcernedwith the opposite-the detection of an underlyinginterdependencebetween parts which superficially appearto be becomingmore independentof one another.In examiningthe and classstratification the educational interfaces betweenoccupational structure, system, they in fact seek to show that the three remain closely linked despite appearances
indicating their progressive dissociation. (Archer & Giner, 1978, pp. 20-21)

What we see, therefore, in Archer's work of the 1970s in respect of the work of Bourdieu is a different kind of appropriation from that which was occurring within the context of the 'new sociology' debate. Archer wanted to use Bourdieu's work not so

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much in itself but, instead, as a phenomenon that could be absorbed into a more general, structuralist account of the relations between education and occupational structure. She aspired to produce an analytical model that, recognizing the cultural specificity of Bourdieu's work, would potentially transcend it. The emergence of Bourdieu's post-structuralism

In fact, Bourdieu had, from the mid-1960s onwards, been gradually articulating the position that was to be labelled 'post-structuralist'. A key text of this period 'Condition de classe et position de classe' (Bourdieu, 1966)-argued explicitly against the structuralist attempt to extrapolate institutional patterns or patterns of social behaviour across cultures on the grounds that these patterns were reflections of the dispositions of the observers and insufficiently recognized that particular structures are the constructs of social agents working within their discrete cultural contexts. Similarly, 'La comparabilite des systemes d'enseignement' (Bourdieu, 1967) sought to argue that the process of making comparisons across culture involved constructing a model of structural homogeneity by reference to which dissimilarities might be measured and that the application of the descriptive model tended to become prescriptive (anticipating the argument of 'Decrire et prescrire'; Bourdieu, 1981). In particular, this was an article that was a contribution to a collection of essays on Education, developpement et democratie, which contended that the application of analytical models of higher education systems derived from Western European capitalist states constituted a form of 'symbolic violence' in relation to the indigenous system in Eastern European communist states. The essence of Bourdieu's postde structuralist method was stated in Esquisse d'une the'orie la pratique (Bourdieu, 1972) in English a year later as a self-contained article entitled 'The Three and published Forms of Theoretical Knowledge' (Bourdieu, 1973b) before it was reformulated and included in the opening chapter of Outline of a theoryof practice (Bourdieu, 1977). This made it clear that Bourdieu was not sympathetic to only an ethnomethodological approach nor to only a structuralist approach. He argued that it was not possible for structuralist analysis to remain hors de combat so as detachedly to disclose patterns in disparate primary experience. There had to be a second 'epistemological break' by means of which structuralist knowledge could itself be subjected to sociological scrutiny so as to reveal the covert social purpose behind the imposition of certain frameworks of conceptual order on the behaviour of individuals and societies possessing their own inherent motivations and self-understandings. 'Les strategies de reconversion' (Bourdieu et al., 1973) was an important text in the development of Bourdieu's application of a post-structuralist framework to encounters within society rather than simply the conceptual encounters between observer and observed. The point of the article was to show that objective, structuralist sociological research sought to explain the relations between education and employment by hypostatizing both spheres, whereas reflexive, post-structuralist analysis had the capacity to show the intrinsic dynamics. Post-structuralist analysis could show that in any given society there are culturally specific power struggles in operation that mean there is a constant

Transcultural transferabilityof Bourdieu's sociology 423 shifting of the reciprocal relationship between education and employment. Based on a study of the inter-generational succession strategies of the 'patrons' of 100 leading French firms ('le patronat'), Bourdieu argued that the social status of occupations alters as a direct consequence of the democratizing of the 'meritocratic' access to these occupations or, alternatively, that the status of different subjects of study changes so that employment-friendly study appropriates the meritocratic legitimacy of traditional study in order to safeguard the interests of those possessing economic power. The important point for the purpose of this article is that it was a necessary corollary of the post-structuralist position Bourdieu was developing that he should subject the educational context within which he was working to sociological analysis. Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1984) worked from a conventional sociology of knowledge account of knowledge construction in Parisian higher education institutions that Bourdieu had undertaken in 1968. The analysis was transformed by the way in which he returned to the earlier findings, carried out supplementary research, and produced a text in which he sought to show that the intellectual positions adopted by individuals within different institutions was a function of their 'strategies of reconversion'-their attempts to trade power and status acquired intellectually for economic and political power and vice versa. The English translation of Homo Academicus added an article that had been separately published in French in 1975 as 'Les categories de l'entendement professoral' (Bourdieu & de Saint Martin, 1975). Here Bourdieu had demonstrated that the discourse used by professors in marking the work of their students at the Ecole Normale Superieure was one aspect of a socialization process whereby was created an espritde corpsthat would socially define normaliens for life. He went on to document a similar process of social differentiation in relation to the French 'grandes ecoles' and the 'classes preparatoires to these institutions, and he published his findings in La noblessed'etat: Grandes e'coleset esprit de corps (Bourdieu, 1989). The analysis can be regarded as an application to educational institutions of the social critique of judgement that Bourdieu had offered in La distinction. (1979). Bourdieu's analysis of the marking of professors might just as appropriately have been entitled the 'categories of professorial judgement' and the Kantian echo is there in both texts. The alternative title for the article might have established the link with La distinction that, in translation, became lost as the book was subtitled 'A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste' and was captured for debate within the field of Cultural Studies. La noblessed'etat analysed the social procedures by which private educational institutions were agents in constructing their own distinctive social status-by their selection processes, curricula, teaching methods, and assessment procedures. The book used some of the findings of the research project on 'le patronat' and it also reflected Bourdieu's increased recognition of the power of 'institutionalised capital' rather than the individualized 'cultural capital' as formulated in his earlier work. Bourdieu's continuing engagement with educational issues, 1970-2002

It would be possible to go on in great detail to illustrate the way in which Bourdieu's work continued to impinge on educational practices and developments in the

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organization of educational systems. I will simply mention three pertinent examples, one from each of the last three decades of his life, before turning to the main thrust of my argument. The first example is the report that Bourdieu edited on behalf of the professors of the College de France in response to a commission from President
Mitterand to formulate some Propositions pour l'enseignement de l'avenir (Bourdieu,

1985). There were nine propositions, which were elaborated in turn. The first three were as follows:
1. The unity of science and the plurality of cultures. Harmonious instruction must

inherentin scientificthoughtand the relativism be able to reconcilethe universalism taughtin the human sciences, alertas they are to the pluralityof culturallife-styles, senses and sensitivities.
2. The diversification of forms of excellence. Teaching must leave no stone

unturned to combat the unitary view of 'intelligence' which brings about the of hierarchisation forms of achievementin relationto each other. It should increase the sociallyrecognisedformsof excellence.
3. The multiplication of opportunities. It would be important to weaken as much as

possible the consequencesof exam resultsand to preventeither the successfulfrom benefitingfrom a kind of consecrationor the unsuccessfulfrom being subjectedto a kind of life sentence. This should be done by multiplyingthe number of career pathways and the routes between them and by weakening all irreversiblecut-off 1985, p. 47; my translation) points. (Propositions, Shortly after the publication of the Report, Bourdieu gave an interview in La Quinzaine Litteraire in which he was asked specifically about the second and third propositions. Referring to the concept of 'reproduction', which had substantially established his international reputation, Bourdieu commented: Yes, I think that the two main contributions of the schooling system to social reproductionare the verdict effect - the deliberateeffect which locks those subject to into trial (lesjusticiables) an essence, a nature('you are that and not anythingelse'), and effectwhich consistsin imposingthe acceptancethat thereis a linear the hierarchisation hierarchyof all competences and that all are only downgradedforms of the perfect competence which is that of the cacique2for the ENA3 ... In that way everyone is someone else manque. (Bourdieu,1985, pp. 8-9; my translation) The second example derives from the account of French poverty that, as director of a du team of researchers, Bourdieu published in 1993 as La mise're monde (Bourdieu et The publication offered a series of transcripts of interviews with various al., 1993). representatives of deprived sectors of the French population and also with various and social workers. The transcripts representatives of caring professionals-teachers were contextualized by means of short introductions provided by the academic interviewers or observers. The intention was that, in this way, the accounts offered by the researchers would be presented alongside the perceptions of the interviewees and contribute to a multi-perspectival vision of complex social situations. By offering the transcripts of people occupying different power positions within situations, it was also intended that there would be a 'maieutic' effect whereby the interviewers acted as 'midwives' for a series of virtual or vicarious encounters. One of the sections of the text was devoted to interviews between researchers and teenage school pupils and between

Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 425

researchersand teachers. The effect of the juxtapositions was not only to show how differently pupils and teachers perceived the situations that they shared, but also, relatedly, to demonstrate that the pedagogical relationshipcould not be autonomized but had to be understood as only one dimension in situations of multiple and interacting deprivations. The third example comes from Bourdieu's last course of lectures given at the College de France during the first half of 2001 and published later that year as Science de la scienceet reflexivite(Bourdieu, 2001). Bourdieu began his enquiry by outlining some of the recent sociological analyses of science, beginning with the 'structuralfunctionalist' account offered by R. K. Merton. Bourdieu discusses a Mertonian article by Cole and Cole entitled 'Scientific Output and Recognition: A Study in the Operation of the Reward System in Science' (Cole & Cole, 1967) and he also discusses Merton's own contributions to the sociology of science, particularly The
Sociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Merton, 1973). As

summarized by Bourdieu, the Cole and Cole article analysed the research of 120 physicists, counting 'forms of recognition', 'honorific awards and memberships in honorific societies', positions 'at top ranked departments' and citations as indices of the use of researchby others. Bourdieu makes a series of comments on this approach. He begins:
This research takesindicesof recognition,likecitation,at theirfacevalue,and everything takes place as if statisticalenquirieswere aimed at verifyingthat the distributionof vision is inscribedin rewardsis perfectlyjustified.This typicallystructural-functionalist as the notion of 'reward system' definedby Merton ... (Bourdieu,2001, pp. 27-28; my translation) He continues: The rewardsystem orientatesthe most productivetowardsthe most productiveroutes and the wisdom of the systemwhich rewardsthose who meritit also consignsothers to careers.... The more researchers recognized(by are dead-endrouteslike administrative the academic system and then by the scientific world), the more they produce and continue to be recognized.(Bourdieu,2001, p. 29; my translation)

And he concludes:
Very objectivist,very realist (there is never any doubt whetherthe social world exists, whether science exists, etc.), very classical (the most classicalinstrumentsof scientific method are deployed), this approachdoes not make the least referenceto the way in which scientific conflicts are regulated. It accepts, in fact, the dominant, logicist,
definition of science to which it intends to conform ... (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 30; my

translation)

I do not need to spell out the ways in which these three examples of Bourdieu's work
since the mid-1980s show how far his analyses related to issues that concern educational practice in the United Kingdom at present. Suffice it to say that his awareness of the French educational system (combined, increasingly, with his sensitivity to international developments) enabled him to articulate a coherent system of thought that suggested links between social phenomena. Consistently and cogently, he questioned whether social science knowledge was of the same kind

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as knowledge in the natural sciences. He therefore thought it possible that the adoption of norms of universal social science knowledge might be a strategy adopted by educational institutions to maintain a 'meritocratic' hierarchy that euphemizes social distinction, devaluing the social perceptions of socially excluded minorities. He would also have thought that the research 'reward system' or research assessment exercise is as much a device for maintaining a self-replicating social community of researchers as, in the teaching context, are admission and assessment procedures, and that both are strategically deployed by institutions to reinforce social distinctions. The BJSE case study These may be superficial or facile transferences from Bourdieu's thinking to the current UK situation, but my concluding point is to draw attention to the fact that there has been very little British effort to consider the relevance of Bourdieu's 'recent' (post-1980) sociological work for an understanding of current educational developments at all levels. It is even possible to suggest that the exclusion of serious consideration of the implications of his thinking constitutes a verification of his analysis. The Editorial of the first volume of the BJSE in 1980 made two key points. It argued, first, that there was a place for a new journal because the American Sociology of Education 'shares in the ethnocentrism characterising American sociology and focuses very closely and also very selectively upon the American scene' (BJSE [ 1980], Volume 1, No. 1, p. 3). The new journal would remedy this situation 'by providing an international, albeit British-based, forum for the publication of the increasing amount of work in the field of sociology of education' (BJSE [1980], Volume 1, No. 1, p. 3). It argued, second, that there was 'no such thing as a consensus on the right approach to the sociology of education' and it therefore followed that the present direction of the journal would be 'concerned with questions of unity, mutual respect and attempts to draw the various tendencies together in a profitable way' (BJSE [1980], Volume 1, No. 1, p. 4). The initial team of 24 people-Executive Editors and the Editorial Board-was ideologically balanced but it was not institutionally balanced. Thirty 'new' polytechnics had been in existence since 1969/70 and, by 1980, had almost as many advanced students as universities (see Pratt, 1997, pp. 26-32) but there was only one representative from the sector in the team. As early as Volume 2, No. 3, of 1981, there was a new Editorial that heralded an increased emphasis on international educational developments. This led to several excellent 'review essays' such as that in by Anton Wesselingh (1982) on 'Sociology of Education in the Netherlands: situations, developments, debates', which considered then specificity of other social and educational contexts but, nevertheless, the tendency of the new international dimension was towards conceptual homogeneity, likely to emphasize transnational structural uniformity rather than cultural difference. There was a danger, therefore, both that educational theories and theorists would become decontextualized and that, relatedly, theories would become detached from social and

Transcultural transferabilityof Bourdieu's sociology 427 educational realities. Volume 5, No. 2 in 1984 showed awareness of this latter danger. The introduction to a symposium on 'The Cuts in British Higher Education' that included an article by John Brennan of the Council for National Academic Awards entitled 'Sociology, Sociologists and survival in Public Sector Colleges' made the comment that: In the future,historiansof educationmay well be surprised the dearthof materialin by educationaljournalsof our time about the dramaticchanges implementedin British highereducationin the earlyto mid-1980s. (Brennan,1984, p. 167) This point was well made and it applies equally to the response to the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1984. Meanwhile, the work of Bourdieu was receiving attention. Origins and Destinations. Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain by Halsey, Heath and Ridge was published in 1980 (Halsey et al., 1980). Based on a referenced knowledge of only two articles by Bourdieu ('The school as a conservative force' [Bourdieu, 1974] and 'Cultural reproduction and social reproduction' [Bourdieu, 1973b]), they had presented a critique of Bourdieu's theories of cultural capital and reproduction. BJSE (Volume 2, No. 1 of 1981) carried a Review Symposium that included a review by M. Hammersley in partial defence of Bourdieu. Volume 3, No. 1 carried a piece by Heath, Halsey and Ridge in which it was manifest that they believed that the wider distribution of educational qualifications amongst social classes discredited Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction. Hammersley's rejoinder rightly pointed out that: ... wide disseminationof educationalcredentialsis perfectlycompatiblewith a strict of reproduction culturalcapital,since Bourdieulays greatemphasison status difference betweeninstitutions,subjectsand courses. (BJSE [1982], 3 (1), p. 91) In other words, Halsey et al. were taking qualifications at face value whereas the essence of the position that Bourdieu had already developed and was to consolidate in his work on 'le patronat' was that the valuation of qualifications is a pawn in the game of occupational allocation. Halsey et al. were disinclined to problematize an autonomous sociology of education perspective by placing it in the wider context of sociologies of culture and knowledge. This exchange is symptomatic of the response to Bourdieu in the subsequent years. As the field of education became autonomized and internationalized, references to Bourdieu's Reproductionin Education, Society and Culture seemed to become at once more and more obligatory in articles and more and more neutralized in respect of specific application. A citation index of references to that one text in the journal would provide rich support for Bourdieu's scepticism about citation as a measure of value. In general, it remained the case that, throughout the life of the journal, references to the work of Bourdieu have almost exclusively been to those texts that were translated into English in the 1970s from texts that he wrote during the 1960s, arising from the educational research that he carried out with JeanClaude Passeron at the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne, Paris. There have, of course, been some wider discussions of Bourdieu's work, such as Roy Nash's 'Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction' (BJSE [1990],

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Volume 11, No. 3); Harker and May's 'Code and Habitus: Comparing the Accounts of Bernstein and Bourdieu' (BJSE [1993], Volume 14, No. 2); and the review symposium in which Sara Delamont, Roy Nash and Michael Apple reviewed Richard Jenkins's introduction to the work of Bourdieu (BJSE [1993], Volume 14, No. 3)but, as their titles suggest, the first two were still looking back to the terminology of 'habitus' and cultural reproduction, and the third moved towards a broader perspective as a result of the scope of Jenkins's book. In the review symposium, Roy Nash commented: obviousas we get to gripswith more and more of Bourdieu's It is becomingincreasingly with a set of concepts,eclectically work... thatthis is a sociologistoperating derived,but and more or less coherentlyorganisedinto theirnew framework, creatinga methodology suitable for applicationto investigationsof the broadest range of social events and
phenomena. (1993, p. 322)

Quite so, but how is it, therefore, that the texts produced by Bourdieu since the late 1970s that have been translated into English and published, mainly by Polity Press, since 1984, have commanded so little attention? Serious engagement with Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1984)-Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988)-and La noblesse State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power d'etat (Bourdieu, 1989)-The (Bourdieu, 1996)-in particular, has been notably lacking. These are two texts directly about education but, as I have tried to show, other key texts such as La mise're du monde and La distinction relate closely to educational experiences and demand attention.

The challenge We are compelled to suppose that there has been a tacit denial of Bourdieu's message. It is as if it is safe to refer to the Bourdieu of the 1960s as some kind of conceptual guru, some kind of legitimate citation fodder, but unsafe to respond to what he was actually trying to say for 45 years. It is as if the sociology of education has become an intellectual instrument for preserving institutional and social hierarchies rather than an instrument for stimulating social criticism and reflection on egalitarianism. This is not to ignore that his work may prove crucially to have been the product of specifically French educational and social conditions and, as Archer contended, of a typically French obsession with equality, but it is to urge that we should look analytically at those different conditions of production of theory and assess how far his insights are transferable to our situation.

Notes
1. G. Causer's 'Private Capital and the State in Western Europe' (Giner & Archer, 1978, pp. 28-

2. 3.

54; my note). e'coles. Pupil takingfirstplace in the entranceexaminationto the grandes Ecole Nationaled'Administration.

Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 429

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